One thing’s happening at Virgin Hyperloop, the startup trying to convey Elon Musk’s imaginative and prescient of high-speed trains to life. In some unspecified time in the future in the previous few weeks, the corporate has quietly modified its title again to Hyperloop One, the model it used between 2016 and 2017. Its web site has been scrubbed clear, too, utilizing an outdated inventory picture of the XP-1 check pod and the declare that “It’s a brand new day at Hyperloop One,” too.
This isn’t only a web site situation, because the Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram accounts have all reverted to the outdated brand and title as properly. And the change must be pretty current — a tweet posted October twenty second nonetheless carried the Virgin brand and title. Whereas we will not speculate on exactly what prompted the change, it seems to be a deliberate effort in direction of de-branding. Seemingly, Richard Branson and Virgin at the moment are now not keen to share a model with the logistics firm.
The corporate has definitely seen a lot of modifications by this 12 months, shedding 111 staffers and abandoning its much-hyped try and construct a passenger system. After that, majority proprietor DP World stated that it could pivot towards utilizing the technology for logistics, enabling the development of “inland ports” to ferry cargo containers to their eventual vacation spot quicker than the current system.
Now we have reached out to Virgin, Hyperloop One and (companion) DP World within the hope of getting some type of clarification on the change, and can replace this if we hear again.
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